Cloud computing refers to the use of dynamically scalable computing resources accessible via a network, such as the Internet. The computing resources, often referred to as a “cloud,” provide one or more services to users. These services may be categorized according to service types, which may include for examples, applications/software, platforms, infrastructure, virtualization, and servers and data storage. The term “cloud-based services” or, more simply, “cloud services” refers not only to services provided by a cloud, but also to a form of service provisioning in which cloud customers contract with cloud service providers for the online delivery of services provided by the cloud. Cloud service providers manage a public, private, or hybrid cloud to facilitate the online delivery of cloud services to one or more cloud customers.
Serverless functions are one example of services in which individual code functions are executed in the cloud. This differs from a virtual machine (VM) service in which the compute environment consists of entire VM instances. Serverless functions alleviate the need for the user to deploy and manage physical servers on which these functions execute. In addition, users are only billed for the actual execution time of each Serverless function instance and not for idle time of the physical servers and VM instances. Another benefit is continuous scaling of function instances to address varying traffic load.